Pentagon denies downing Russian Mars probe

The Russians are pretty sure they know why their Mars moon probe fritzed out. It must have been US radar waves,
emanating from a facility named after the hated Ronald Reagan all
the way out into the depths of space. And wouldn't that be
just like Reagan?

Alas, that's "utterly impossible," says Brian Weeden, a Wired
pal and a former officer with the US Air Force Space Command. Radar
just doesn't work like that. And the Pentagon denies the whole
thing, of course. Problem is, Weeden says, "it's going to be almost
impossible to disprove to the believers."

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, recently sought to unravel
the mystery of why Russia's expensive Phobos-Grunt space
probe fell to Earth last week. The probe, launched in November, was
supposed to take soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos. Yet it
never got out of Earth's orbit. And the Russians have a culprit:
American radar stations.

And not just any Russians, the deputy prime
minister, Dmitry Rogozin. "There is evidence indicating that
frequent disruptions in the operation of our space technologies
occur in that part of the flight path that is not visible to
Roscosmos and is beyond its control," Rogozin said, citing none of
that evidence. He added, a little defensively, that his version of
the truth " has the right to exist."

Short answer: no, it doesn't. "I've heard of full-mooner
theories," says George Little, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, "and
this is one of them."

Longer answer: This couldn't be true.

But give this to the Russians. The most likely US radar site to
mess with a Russian spacecraft is in an Army installation at the
obscure Pacific Ocean location known as the Kwajalein Atoll, where powerful radars provide the US early
warning on "deep space and synchronous satellites, particularly
those in low inclination orbits."

Still, the idea is indeed wrong. As it happens, some amateur
sleuths and conspiracy-debunkers did the math on
the Phobos' positions when it passed over the Kwajalein
radar. During each of the probe's two passes, it was below the
radar's horizon.

But even if it got a full blast of Reagan, the radar waves
wouldn't have destroyed the probe's electronic systems. "It's just
nuts to claim that even a full-power blast from the radar could
disrupt a satellite in this way," Weeden says.

And it seems that the Russians actually know it. Roscosmos chief
Vladimir Popovkin ultimately concluded that the probe malfunctioned
because of boring old "errors during production and test works, as
well as the engineering flaws." Someone just needs to tell the
deputy prime minister. This isn't something that can be blamed on
Ronald Reagan.